Studies from Schier Lab featured in Science ‘Breakthrough of the Year
A series of studies conducted by Alexander Schier, the Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and members of his lab, including Jeff Farrell, Yiqun Wang, Bushra Raj, and James Gagnon, and additional work by colleagues from Harvard Medical School (HMS), including Allon Klein, Sean Megason and Marc Kirschner, have been featured as the “2018 Breakthrough of the Year” by Science Magazine. Using a combination of single-cell RNA sequencing and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, the team was able to mark and follow thousands of individual embryonic cells before turning to computational approaches to reconstruct the developmental trajectories and lineages that generate neurons, muscle, blood, and other cell types. The work was described in three papers published in Science in April and a paper in Nature Biotechnology in March. “Science’s Breakthrough of the Year recognizes the application of this tag-analyze-assemble approach to one of the most fundamental and fascinating processes in...